Runa woke to the smell of burned bread and the sound of people shouting.

  She was on her feet before her eyes were fully open. It took her a moment to remember the night before.

  The mountains at war with each other. The fortress rising out of the ground.

  The storm.

  Her camp, her clients, that strange woman—she pulled out the contract charms and stared at them.

  Still sunlight-yellow.

  They’d survived the night. The wizards, anyway. She could only hope the woman was still with them, and still alive, and hadn’t done one of those stupid things treasure-hunters liked to do, like run off after her lost swords.

  And now it was morning. The snow that had blown through at the bottom of the smashed-in door was a solid drift, but sunlight gleamed through the gap along the top. She stared at it, blinking.

  “You seeing this, Junilla?” a man yelled, somewhere outside. “It’s come well over the Rim. I tell you, something weird’s going on.”

  Runa blinked. The man spoke Plains, the most common human dialect across the continent, but his accent was something westerly and coastal.

  “Forget the ice. I see smoke coming from the bakery,” a woman replied, in an accent that had a trace of the Peaceful Seas. Which meant neither of them were local. An adventuring party? Was she still in the Cauldron?

  Bakery, the woman had said. Was that where she was? Runa’s eyes flicked to the oven.

  And stuck there.

  The fire had burned down overnight. The logs were a crumble of dull embers. Salvageable, but cooling.

  And something was eating her bread.

  The creature couldn’t have been bigger than her hand. It was some sort of lizard, its translucent skin a red-orange that reminded her of the blob of heat her lightstick made, squat and flat-bodied, with four splayed legs and a wide mouth.

  Two protuberant eyes met hers, and it froze in the middle of stretching its mouth over her campbread roll.

  “Hey in there!” Someone knocked on the door. Snow fell in sunlit clumps. “What’d you do, sneak back in with the storm chasing your ass?”

  “Give us a minute, Junilla, I’ll dig him out.”

  “Miller’s going to dig you out!”

  Dig him out? Who did they think she was? Runa reached automatically for her axe, which wasn’t there. She glanced back at the oven—shit. The creature was gone.

  Her breakfast was still there, though with a large chunk missing.

  She took a quick inventory. The lightstick was propped against the wall by the oven where she’d left it the night before. There were other things balanced there too: a couple of big flat wooden shovels, a small round thing like a door or well lid. She could use it as a shield in a pinch, but if she was going to do that, she might as well use the actual door.

  Her bag was in the corner, where she’d meant to use it as a pillow before she fell asleep without managing to even lie down. And she was…

  Runa winced. She was sore, battered and bruised all over.

  Like she’d fallen down a mountain, or something.

  She stretched out each limb and twisted side to side carefully, which gave her the important information that, yes, everything hurt.

  There was the scrape of shovel on snow, then shovel on door, and someone flung the door open. Onto the floor.

  Runa tensed.

  A squat figure stood in the doorway. A dwarf, his red-gold hair and beard disappearing beneath a bulky woollen scarf. Runa’s mind offered up as though in contrast an image of the woman she’d saved the day before, and the memory of those dark scared eyes surrounded by snow-flecked lashes lingered even when she forced her attention back to the present.

  The dwarf stared down at the door lying on the flagstones, and shrugged. “Oof. Well. That’s my job done.” He was already turning away, waving vaguely in Runa’s direction without having apparently looked at her. “I’m off—”

  “There’s the rest of the village to dig out before you go hunting whatever the Cauldron spat out this time.” A tanned human woman with golden hair fading to iron appeared in the doorway, blocking the dwarf’s way out. She was wearing a long, thick cloak, and unlike the dwarf, she spotted Runa at once. “Who are you?”

  “Who’s who?” the dwarf muttered.

  With an expression of long-suffering patience, the woman put her hand on the dwarf’s head and slowly spun him around.

  “Who the hells is that?” he spluttered when he caught sight of Runa, his gold-hazel eyes widening. “Where’s the baker?”

  “Still wherever he ran off to, I assume.” The woman looked Runa up and down, and then up and up again. Her eyes narrowed.

  “We’ve not seen you here before. Holed up in here away from the storm, is that how it went? Been a while since we’ve had any troll visitors.” The dwarf looked like he was over his shock now. He elbowed the woman in the ribs, though he had to reach up to do it. “You haven’t brought a message from the mountains, by chance?”

  The woman smacked him lightly on the back of the head.

  “I’m just wondering, if your fella—”

  “Stop wondering,” the woman suggested. The room suddenly felt even icier, though neither of the newcomers had actually stepped indoors.

  In fact, they seemed to be deliberately staying outside the threshold.

  The dwarf didn’t seem to notice his companion’s iciness. His eyes took on a speculative twinkle as he turned back to Runa. “And is that fresh bread I smell? Say, you wouldn’t be something of a baker yourself, would you—”

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  “Don’t pull the woman into your schemes before you’ve even asked her name, Tam.”

  “I’m just wondering out loud…”

  “I’m Junilla. I own the inn here in Pothollow,” the woman said. She nodded at the dwarf. “This is Tam Miller.”

  Which meant he must be the local miller. Names worked that way for villagers in this part of the world.

  They both looked at her expectantly.

  Talking to people was also a part of her job. But she was better at the “Look out!” and “Don’t get eaten by that reef-bear!” parts of it than… any of the other bits. Somehow, conversation was easier when danger was imminent, probably because the subject of the conversation was always obvious.

  Small talk? Not so much.

  “Runa,” Runa said shortly. And they would probably need more information than that, so… “Got swept in on the storm yesterday.”

  Junilla grimaced sympathetically. “And you found your way in here without any problems?”

  Other than knocking the door down? “Uh, sure.”

  “No… interruptions?”

  She said it with the sort of careful lack of inflection that made Runa wonder what she was trying so hard not to talk about. “Apart from the storm?”

  “I suppose that’s interruption enough.” Junilla shrugged, looking around the room with poorly veiled curiosity. “It’s been a while since any of the mountains made their way to our ridge. I can’t say we’re happy to see them again, but better the Cauldron spit you out here than somewhere you wouldn’t have found any shelter.”

  Runa blinked, surprised, then nodded. “Better for me, sure.”

  Junilla grinned. “Better for us both. You look like you’d be good at digging?”

  She said it like a question, but it wasn’t. And when she saw outside, Runa knew she would have volunteered anyway.

  The snow reached her chin. She had the odd experience of looking out at a blanket of fresh snow at almost eye-level. The path Tam Miller had dug to reach the bakery door was more of a tunnel in places, and she started by knocking the roof out of it.

  “How’s the view up there?”

  She snorted. It was a shame she wasn’t sticking around, because now he’d gotten over his surprise, the dwarf’s lack of wariness was refreshing.

  Maybe she’d find her way back here on a job someday.

  “White,” she said flatly, then cast around for something else to say. “You want to get up on the roof, get your bearings?”

  “Nope.”

  “I do,” Junilla said.

  The bakery had a steep, tiled roof. Runa boosted Junilla up onto the closest side and followed her up, getting her first real look at the village.

  There wasn’t much to see. A scatter of buildings half-or-more buried in snow. The mountain fell away in front of them, down to a larger town and rolling plains patchworked in forests and farmland in various shades of green, too far away for the Cauldron-spewed blizzard to reach. Junilla had said the village was on a ridge near the Rim?

  From the angle of the sun, they were somewhere on the northern edge.

  A long, long way from where she’d started.

  Her heart sank.

  “This is Pothollow,” Junilla said. She shook her head. “That’s my tavern, down the way. I’ve been here ten years, and I’ve never seen snow as deep as this. The Cauldron usually keeps its storms to itself, but last night…”

  The big building down the way with smoke coming from multiple chimneys must be the tavern. Runa scanned the other rooftops quickly. Smoke drifted in columns from each one.

  Junilla eyed her. “Good instinct,” she said. “If their fires are still lit this morning, they must be alive enough in there to have put wood on overnight. Things are bad, but not as bad as they could have been. What brought you to the Cauldron, Runa?”

  “I’m a guide.”

  “Hah! And do the adventurers you ferry around the Cauldron tend to survive?”

  Runa thought of the bickering wizards, and the desperate, dark-eyed woman clinging to her daggers. She rubbed one hand against her chest, so the beads clinked against her medallion.

  “Most of them,” she said.

  “Then consider this village your latest client. We all made it through the night. Now let’s make sure they make it to the tavern.”

  Runa hesitated. It wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, but… “How well does this job pay?”

  “Oh, the rewards are endless. But to start with I’ll credit you a hot meal and your drink of choice. And—”

  She pinned Runa with a frown, then her gaze flicked downwards. Runa braced herself against her inspection, and then braced herself against the very small part of her that thought Well, maybe… because Junilla was the sort of no-nonsense, straightforward woman she’d always thought she might be interested in if she let herself have time for that sort of thing, but Junilla’s look was pure business assessment, nothing else.

  “And a new pair of boots,” she added.

  Runa tucked her toe back into the worn-out sock.

  “Can’t say no to that,” she said. “Boots, dinner and a place to stay, and I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”

  “Will you?” Junilla asked mildly.

  “I’ve got to get back to…”

  Runa’s voice trailed off as Junilla’s gaze shifted meaningfully behind her. She stood and looked past the steep bakery roof, towards the town walls she’d broken through in the storm the night before.

  She couldn’t see the walls. The only thing beyond the bakery was a towering cliff of ice. And behind it, a range of familiar icy peaks blotted out the sky.

  Runa swore. The avalanche hadn’t just thrown her to the Rim. It had thrown the mountains back, as well, exploding them from where they’d tried to push the black fortress back underground to as far as they could get away from it.

  Which meant there wasn’t just the Rim to jump over to get back into the Cauldron and find her clients. There was a wall of ice, and then a wall of mountains, and then… whatever had happened to the Cauldron beyond.

  She resisted the urge to check the charms again.

  Instead, her gaze dropped lower. Oh. There was the town wall, barely peeking over the snow. No wonder she hadn’t seen it at first. It was so short that if Runa had been able to see it through the storm the night before, she could have vaulted over it.

  So small it looked like a child’s toy.

  Runa’s heart sank. She turned back to the village.

  She wasn’t unfamiliar with Rim settlements. Many of the adventurers who ventured into the Cauldron went through the reinforced town of Sollus’ Gate, and this village was much like that—except where Sollus’ Gate was a bustling commercial town, full of hostels, shops and other businesses that catered to adventurers, Pothollow was a straggle of small stone and wood houses.

  Weather from the Cauldron rarely made it as far as Sollus’ Gate. But last night’s blizzard had blanketed Pothollow in snow so deep that most of the buildings were buried at least half-deep, and a few Runa could only guess at by the whisper of smoke coming from chimney-holes in the snow.

  And where Sollus’ Gate was separated from the Cauldron by a triple-layer of reinforced walls, and there was a full half-day’s walk between the walls and the actual Rim, up a narrow, defensible road, Pothollow was only a stone’s throw from the most dangerous curses the realm had ever known.

  Leaving was not going to be as easy as she thought.

  Digging trenches through the snow, though? That she could manage.

  ***

  Junilla was as good as her word about the boots. While Runa was still finding her way around the shovel, she disappeared back to the tavern briefly and reappeared with a pair of old leather boots.

  Troll boots. Runa recognized the patterns beaten into the heads of the hobnails in the soles, and the eyelets for the laces.

  “An old friend left them. If he wants them back, he can come back and tell me so,” Junilla sniffed with a fierce glint in her eye.

  That must be the troll Tam Miller had mentioned back in the bakery. An old lover?

  Clearing out paths to the other houses took up the rest of the day. Junilla wasn’t the village headwoman, so far as Runa could tell, or any sort of local noble, but she did the job of one. Whenever they dug their way to another door, Junilla made sure everyone inside was safe, then directed them to gather back at the tavern where the fire was roaring and Tam’s husband was in charge of getting everyone fed. Whoever the local lord was, the people here clearly didn’t expect any help from them.

  It was early evening, and Runa was taking a break from digging. She leaned on her shovel and gnawed on her lump of burned bread. She’d made it last the day, supplemented with cold meats and vegetables passed along the line of villagers digging tunnels between the houses, but there was little enough of it that she thought mournfully of the chunk that strange creature had stolen.

  What was that thing, anyway? A fire sprite of some sort? If so, it was a long way from home.

  Same as her.

  She was still turning over that depressing thought in her mind when Junilla bustled up the snowy avenue and grabbed her by the elbow.

  “Quit moping around,” she ordered, her voice ringing with the certainty that Runa was moping, and now that she’d ordered her not to, she would stop. “I promised you dinner. And you’d better meet everyone properly.”